ASIC Miners: Types and Features

Devices intended for the production of virtual currency are issued in several categories, depending on the requests of consumers. So, you can buy small devices – designed for the production of cryptocurrency at home, as well as professional.

Miners of small sizes in most cases connect to the USB-connector and receive electricity through it. This kind of miners has the smallest size, and also the smallest capacity.

This is the kind of first chips called USB Block Erupter, produced by ASICminer, which was the first company to manufacture chips for digital currency production.

This chip has the following characteristics:

300 Мh/s;

1.05 V;

335 MHz;

6×6 mm;

4.2 W per 1Gh/s.

After some time, compact miners began to be manufactured on the Coicraft and Bitfury chips. But due to the fact that they brought only nominal income, the demand for them was very low. Soon the miners of these companies stopped using at all.

Professional miners and devices used to extract virtual currency at home differ only in their size and level of energy consumption. Their other characteristics are identical in most cases.

Devices used for home mining, as a rule, have lower-cost enclosures and lower-capacity fans. Such devices have a lower weight, and for their operation, it is quite enough for an average power supply with a power from 600 to 700 watts. Most often at home users use the Antminer class S1, S3, and S5 devices.

Miners must be located in specialized server rooms for professional cryptocurrency extraction. In this case, the devices are installed in 19-inch racks. Power supplies are built-in by default in such miners. Sometimes, their power can be more than 1 kilowatt. High power fans are used for their cooling, which also have a high noise level, but effectively cool the equipment. The best representatives of professional miners are Antminer S2 and S4.

The ASIC miners are compared against each other on the basis of such characteristics:

Technological process;

The level of performance;

Power consumption, watt per second;

The cost of one gigahash per second;

The average temperature of the chip.

The latter indicator in most cases depends on the level of the technological process. Typically, the temperature of the chip should range from 40 to 60 °C.